Authors: Donald Barthelme
“I HAVE killed this whole bottle of Chablis wine by myself,” Dan said. “And that other
bottle of Chablis too—that one under the bed. And that other bottle of Chablis too—the
one with the brown candle stuck in the mouth of it. And I am not afraid. Not of what
may come, not of what has been. Now I will light that long cigar, that cigar that
stretches from Mont St. Michel and Chartres, to under the volcano. What is merely
fashionable will fade away, and what is merely new will fade away, but what will not
fade away, is the way I feel: analogies break down, regimes break down, but the way
I feel remains. I feel abandoned. After a hard day tending the vats, and washing the
buildings, one wants to come home and find a leg of mutton on the table, in a rich
gravy with little pearly onions studded in it, and perhaps a small pot of Irish potatoes
somewhere about. Instead I come home to this nothingness. Now she sits in her room
reading
Dissent
and admiring her figure in the mirror. She still loves us, in a way, but it isn’t
enough. It is a failure of leadership, I feel. We have been left sucking the mop again.
True leadership would make her love us fiercely and excitingly, as in the old days.
True leadership would find a way out of this hairy imbroglio. I am tired of Bill’s
halting explanations, promises. If he doesn’t want to lead, then let us vote. That
is all I have to say, except one
more thing: when one has been bending over a hot vat all day, one doesn’t want to
come home and hear a lot of hump from a cow-hearted leader whose leadership buttons
have fallen off—some fellow who spends the dreamy days eating cabbage and watching
ships, while you are at work. Work, with its charts, its lines of authority, its air
of importance.”
“THE refusal of emotion produces nervousness,” Bill said dipping into the barrel of
decadent absinthe. “Remember that. You are tense as a wire-walker, Hubert. If it is
still possible to heave a sigh you should heave it. If it is still possible to rip
out a groan you should rip it out. If it is still possible to smite the brow with
anguished forefinger then you should let that forefinger fall. And there are expostulations
and entreaties that meet the case to be found in old books, look them up. This concatenation
of outward and visible signs may I say may detonate an inward invisible subjective
correlative, booming in the deeps of the gut like an Alka-Seltzer to produce tranquillity.
I say may. And you others there, lounging about with expressions of steely unconcern,
you are just like Hubert. The disease is the same and the remedy is the same. As for
me, I am out of it. I have copted out if you want to put it that way. After a life
rich in emotional defeats, I have looked around for other modes of misery, other roads
to destruction. Now I limit myself to listening to what people say, and thinking what
pamby it is, what they say. My nourishment is refined from the ongoing circus of the
mind in motion. Give me the odd linguistic trip, stutter and fall, and I will be content.
Actually, when you get right down to it, I should be the monk, and Paul the leader
here.” “We have entertained the notion,” Hubert said.
“THEY can treat me like a rube if they wish,” Clem said holding tightly to the two
hundred bottles of Lone Star at the Alamo Chili House. “I suppose I am a rubish hayseed
in some sense, full of down-home notions that contradict the more sophisticated notions
of my colleagues. But I notice that it is to me they come when it is a question of
grits or chitlings or fried catfish. Of course these questions do not arise very often.
I have not had a whiff of fried catfish these twelve years! How many nights have I
trudged home with my face fixed for fried catfish, only to find that we were having
fried calimaretti or some other Eastern dish. Not that I would put down those tender
rings of squid deep-fried in olive oil. I even like the squarish can the olive oil
comes in, emblazoned with green-and-gold devices, flowery emblemature out of the nineteenth
century. It makes my mouth water just to look at it, that can. But why am I talking
to myself about cans? Cans are not what is troubling me. What is troubling me is the
quality of life in our great country, America. It seems to me to be deprived. I don’t
mean that the deprived people are deprived, although they are, clearly, but that even
the fat are deprived. I suppose one could say that they are all humpheads and let
it go at that. I am worried by the fact that no one responded to Snow White’s hair
initiative. Even though I am at the same time relieved. But it suggests that Americans
will not or cannot see themselves as princely. Even Paul, that most princely of our
contemporaries, did not respond appropriately. Of course it may be that princely is
not a good thing to be. And of course there is our long democratic tradition which
is anti-aristocratic. Egalitarianism precludes princeliness. And yet our people are
not equal in any sense. They are either . . . The poorest of them are slaves as surely
as if they were chained to gigantic wooden oars. The richest of them have the faces
of cold effete homosexuals. And those in the middle are wonderfully confused. Redistribute
the money. That will not ameliorate everything, but it will ameliorate some things.
Redistribute the money. This can be achieved in only one way. By making the rich happier.
New lovers. New lovers who will make their lives exciting and ‘rich’ in a way that . . .
We must pass a law that all marriages of people with more than enough money are dissolved
as of tomorrow. We will free all these poor moneyed people and let them out to play.
The quid pro quo is their money. Then we take the money and—”
EDWARD was blowing his mind, under the boardwalk. “Well my mind is blown now. Nine
mantras and three bottles of insect repellent, under the boardwalk. I shall certainly
be sick tomorrow. But it is worth it to have a blown mind. To stop being a filthy
bourgeois for a space, even a short space. To gain access to everything in a new way.
Under the boardwalk. Those cream Corfam shoes clumping overhead. I understand them
now, for the first time. Not their molecular structure, in which I am not particularly
interested, but their sacredness. Their centrality. They are the center of everything,
those shoes. They are it. I know that, now. Too bad it is not worth knowing. Too bad
it is not true. It is not even temporarily true. Well, that must mean that my mind
is not fully blown. That harsh critique. More insect repellent!”
IT WAS NOT UNTIL THE 19TH CENTURY THAT RUSSIA PRODUCED A LITERATURE WORTHY OF BECOMING
PART OF THE WORLD’S CULTURAL HERITAGE. PUSHKIN DISPLAYED VERBAL FACILITY. GOGOL WAS
A REFORMER. AS A STYLIST DOSTOEVSKY HAD MANY SHORTCOMINGS. TOLSTOY . . .
IN her chamber Snow White removed her coat, and then her shirt, and then her slip,
and then her bra. The bare breasts remained. Standing by the window Snow White regarded
her bare breasts, by pointing her head down. “Well, what is there to think about them?
Usually I don’t think about them at all, but think, rather, about common occurrences,
like going to the bowling alley or seeing, in the sky, the wingspread of a gigantic
jet aircraft. But recent events, or lack of events, have provoked in me a crisis of
confidence. But let us take stock. These breasts, my own, still stand delicately away
from the trunk, as they are supposed to do. And the trunk itself is not unappealing.
In fact
trunk
is a rather mean word for the main part of this assemblage of felicities. The cream-of-wheat
belly! The stunning arse, in the rococo mirror! And then the especially good legs,
including the important knees. I have nothing but praise for this delicious assortment!
But my curly mind has problems distinct from although related to those of my scrumptious
body. The curious physicality of my existence here on Earth is related to both parts
of the mind-body problem, the mind part and the body part. Although I secretly know
that my body
is
my mind. The way it acts sometimes, spontaneously and scandalously hurling itself
into the arms of bad situations, with never a care for who is watching or
real values. No wonder we who are twenty-two don’t trust anybody over twelve. That
is where you find people who know the score, under twelve. I think I will go out and
speak to some eleven-year-olds, now, to refresh myself. Now or soon.” Snow White regarded
her nice-looking breasts. “Not the best I’ve ever seen. But not the worst.”
BOBBLE was one of the boys who was there. He had a hair style that, I don’t know,
some of you may not like, and there were other things wrong with him too. I had thought
that in terms of mettle he would glister like a fire escape. Whereas in fact he was
a sack of timidities. That much was clear. But we had sent for him so we had to talk
to him. “All right lad this is what we want with you. Your mission is this: to go
out into the world and pull down all those election posters. We have decided to stop
voting, so pull down the posters. Let’s get all those ugly faces off our streets and
out of our elective offices. We are not going to vote any more, no matter how often
they come around with their sound trucks and statesmanlike gestures. Pull down the
sound trucks. Pull down the outstretched arms. To hell with the whole business. Voting
has turned out to be a damned impertinence. They never do what we want them to do
anyhow. And when they do what we don’t want them to do, they don’t do it well. To
hell with them. We are going to save up all our votes for the next twenty years and
spend them all at one time. Maybe by that day there will be some Rabelaisian figure
worth spending them on. And so, raw youth, with your tentative air, go out and work
our will on the physical world. We are going to go whole hog on this program, to a
certain
extent, and you are our chosen instrument. We are not particularly proud of you, but
you exist, in some rough way, and that is enough, for our purposes. You are sub-attractive,
Bobble, and so are your peers there, but here is the money, and there is the task.
Get going.”
UNDER the tree, Paul stood looking through the window at Snow White, with her bare
breasts. “God Almighty,” Paul said to himself. “It’s a good thing it occurred to me
to stand under this tree and look through this window. It’s a good thing I am on leave
from the monastery. It’s a good thing I had my reading glasses in my upper robe pocket.”
Paul read the message written on Snow White’s unwrapped breasts. “She is just like
one of those dancers one sees from time to time on Bourbon Street in New Orleans,
and in selected areas of other cities. In the smaller cities the dancers are sometimes
forced by the police to put on more garb. But without garb, these girls bring joy,
with their movements, lack of movements. . . . Dancing is diverting if you are watching,
and also if you are dancing yourself. But how can you ‘dance yourself’? Is ‘self-dancing’
the answer? I was fond of stick dancing at one time. There was some joy in that. But
then a man came and said I was using the wrong kind of stick. He was a stick-dancing
critic, he said, and no one used that kind of stick any more. The stick of choice,
he said, was more brutal than the one I was using, or less brutal, I forget which.
Brutalism had something to do with it. I said, fuck off, buddy, leave me alone with
my old stick, the stick of my youth. He fucked off, then. But I became dissatisfied
with that stick,
subjected as it had been for the first time to the scrutiny of a first-rate intelligence.
I sublet the stick. And that is why I have become everything I have become since,
including what I now am, a voyeur.” Paul looked again at the upper part of Snow White.
“Looking through this window is sweet. The sweetest thing that has happened to me
in all my days. Sweet, sweet.” Paul savored the sweetness of human communication,
through the window.
PAUL HAS NEVER BEFORE REALLY SEEN SNOW WHITE AS A WOMAN.
HOGO pushed Paul away from the bloody tree. “You are a slime sir, looking through
that open window at that apparently naked girl there, the most beautiful and attractive
I have ever seen, in all my life. You are a dishonor to the robes you wear. That you
stand here without shame gazing at that incredible beauty, at her snowy buttocks and
so forth, at that natural majesty I perceive so well, through the window, is endlessly
reprehensible, in our society. I have seen some vileness in my time, but your action
in spying upon this beautiful unknown beauty, whom I already love with all my heart
until the end of time, is the most vile thing that the mind of man ever broached.
I am going to set a rat chewing at your anus, false monk, for if there is anything
this world affords, it is punishment.” “You have a good line, fellow,” Paul said coolly.
“Perhaps next you would care to make a few remarks about unearned pessimism as original
sin.” “It is true that I am generally in favor of earned pessimism, Paul,” Hogo said.
“And I have earned mine. Yet at the same time I seem to feel a new vigor, optimism
and hope, simply through the medium of pouring my eyes through this window.” “It is
strong medicine, this,” Paul said, and they put their arms around each other’s shoulders
to look some more, but Hogo was thinking about how he could get rid of Paul, once
and for all, permanently.
HOGO began to make a plan. It was to be a large plan, a plan as big as a map. Make
no small plans, as Pott has said. The object of the plan was to get inside the house
when no one was there. No one but Snow White. Hogo played Polish music on his player.
Then he stuck pins in his plan marking points of entry and points of ejection. Pins
of red, blue, violet, green, yellow, black and white bespattered the plan. The plan
oozed out over the floor of the living room into the dining room. Then it ran into
the kitchen, bedroom and hall. Plant life from the bursting nature outside came to
regard the plan. A green finger of plant life lay down on top of the plan. Jane entered
trailing a shopping cart filled with shopping. “What is all this paper on the floor?”
Hogo lay atop the plan, and atop the plant life, attempting to conceal them. “It’s
nothing. Some work I brought home from the office.” “Why then are you making those
swimming motions on top of it?” “I was taking a nap.” “It doesn’t look like a nap
to me.” Hogo regarded Jane. He noticed that she had her graceful cello shape, still.
“This cello-shaped girl still has some life in her,” Hogo reflected. “Why don’t I
spend more time looking at her and drinking in her seasoned beauty.” But then he thought
of the viola da gamba-shaped Snow White. “Why is it that we always require ‘more,’”
Hogo wondered. “Why is it that we can never be satisfied. It is almost as if we were
designed that way. As if that were part of the cosmic design.” Hogo gathered up the
plan and packed it away in the special planning humidor, constructed especially to
keep the plan fresh and exciting. “Maybe I should make cigar wrappers of this plan,
to conceal it from its enemies. The cigars to be smoked in a particular order, and
in the clouds of smoke arising, the first faint dim blue outlines of the plan. I wonder
what the chemistry and physics of that would be.” Hogo regarded the packed plan, in
its humidor. “It seems to have weak spots. The possibility of resistance from those
within.” Hogo imagined the resistance leader in his black turtleneck sweater. “I’ll
wager I never get into that house clandestinely, the resistance will be so stiff.
For people who have a treasure, guard it with their lives. What a wonk I am, planning-wise!
I will have to think up a new abnegation to punish myself for thinking up a plan this
poor—playing the accordion, possibly.” “What are you thinking about?” Jane asked holding
tensely to the handle of the shopping cart. “Playing the accordion,” Hogo said.